Editorial: Some depressing drug-war math

2013-01-25 16:33:10

Supporters of America's continuing "war on drugs" like to scare the rest of us into pursuing the same path that the nation's governments have been taking for decades – ratcheting up police interdiction efforts, imprisoning drug users and pushing the envelope on government snooping to intercept drug dealers and their cash.

If we don't follow this path, we're warned, an epidemic of drug use and lawlessness will sweep the nation. Yet many of the drug-related problems the nation faces – gang wars and crime waves in particular – are the result of government prohibition and crackdown on drugs, not drugs themselves.

Drugs, obviously, are bad, but the current cop-and-incarceration model pushes out more humane and compassionate treatment-based alternatives for addicts. It's not as if people aren't using drugs right now even though they are illegal, and there's scant evidence that decriminalizing, or even legalizing, them will make an appreciable difference in the number of regular users.

A video, "The Haunting Math of America's War on Drugs," posted on the website of Popular Science magazine and provided by the Clarity Way drug rehab center, using federal statistics, illustrates that the drug war itself is a frightening problem. The math is incontrovertible. For instance, 51.5 percent of the nation's federal prisoners were sentenced for drug offenses.

Drug warriors like to argue that mere possession of drugs rarely results in jail time, but the data suggest otherwise. Nearly 82 percent of arrests for drug-law violations in 2010 were for drug possession.

Significantly cutting back arrest rates, and transferring some of that money toward drug treatment, would be a boon for the state budget, especially given the data showing that people who complete drug treatment programs are 67 percent less-likely to return to prison. We would argue for privatized treatment programs, often more effective than government-run ones.

Yet the drug war continues. With the Obama administration pursuing its crackdown on medical marijuana clinics and opposing state legalization efforts, now is a great time to add more facts and less fear into the debate.